Free One by Conrad Williams

have fun or failed to enjoy themselves, but later in their holiday, canoeing in the Bristol Channel or scrambling in Llantwit Major did not inspire the excitement it ought to have done. There seemed a check on their behaviour, as if screaming or laughing in the wake of what they had witnessed would somehow be disrespectful. The enormity of what lay beyond the Earth's meagre pull, the knowledge that they had been staring at stars long dead before the Earth had cooled, humbled them both. Jane wondered if that night had damned them in some way. Instead of opening themselves to the beauty of it, they had taken a left turn and talked about the blanket lifelessness in space and time, other than on this speck of blue-green dust.
They returned home and two weeks later Cherry told him she was pregnant.
The wind around him, harsh and frantic, as if trying to get inside him. The sea a black wall. He remembered a magazine he'd started collecting, years before – he must have been thirteen, into fighter jets and blood – about the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, and the British campaign to get them back. It was one of those magazines whose introductory price was remarkably low, but then reverted to a couple of pounds and went on interminably; he never followed the run through to the finish.
The Marines and the Paras covered more than fifty miles of inhospitable land by foot in bad weather in three days, carrying full pack. 'Marching' didn't do it justice; 'yomping' was more like it.
Treat this as an act of liberation , Jane told himself. This is not about you. The miles will go easier if you keep your mind on Stanley. You can tell him about yomping when you see him. You can tell him about Goose Green and the Paras, and his namesake port where the final battle took place. He'll love that.
Stanley had begun to be fascinated by death. But he didn't see it as a permanent thing. Playing with his Star Wars characters, he would 'dead' somebody and after a while they would come back to life. But it was obviously in his thoughts. They went to Brittany for a holiday – their last as a family – exploring the coast of rose-coloured granite, and Stanley had come right out and asked him, 'What means die? What means dead?' Stanley and Cherry had decided on a policy early on, not to lie, not to dress things up, and so Jane had told him exactly what it meant. 'It means you stop breathing, your heart stops beating. Your brain stops thinking. And it's like that for ever. You never come back from it.'
Stanley had digested this, his eyes wide and fixed on the
middle distance as they were whenever he thought hard about things, and said: 'Will I die?'
'Everyone dies, mate.'
'Oh,' Stanley said, and his eyes turned glassy with tears. 'Will you die?'
Jane nodded.
'Before me?'
Jane had almost said I hope so but thought that would confuse him. 'Yes, Stan.'
'Oh, Dad. I don't want to die. I don't want you to die.'
'I don't want to either. But don't worry. It won't be for a long, long time.'
Stanley had become a little more clingy than usual after that. He woke up in the night and called for him and he would go, sensing Cherry stiffen beside him. 'I luff you with all my heart, Dad. I luff you for a five hundred million hundred three minutes.'
Cherry seemed to resent the attention Stanley was giving Jane. And he was at a loss to explain why his son was favouring him. 'It's just a phase,' he suggested. 'A male thing. It doesn't mean he loves you any less just because he doesn't tell you. Boys can be awkward sods.'
Cherry rejected this. She claimed Jane was encouraging Stanley's ambivalence, using it as a wedge between him and his mother. Jane had been shocked. 'Why would I do that? Why would I want to turn Stanley against you?'
'Because you want custody of him.'
He remembered the impact of that, how it had floored him, numbed his tongue. She had that ability, to throw something into an argument that was unexpected, that didn't follow the fight's